The Battle of Wurtbad - Preamble

So it has been a while since I last wrote anything on the subject of my and MLB's Realms of Chaos campaign. That doesn't mean the campaign has been completely inactive. Just mostly inactive.

With two warbands a piece we had played out three of the four possible battle combinations (ignoring the two possible combinations where our own warbands fight each other). The last combination presented something of a dilemma. For a start both of our remaining warbands were  Nurgle warbands. This didn't rule out a conflict, champions of the same God often fight each other to gain the favour of their god, but it felt less natural than the previous battles we had fought. More troubling was the relative strength of the warbands. Thanks to a couple of lucky rolls, Rolf Hurtziger's warband had added a Beast of Nurgle and a Dragon-Ogre to the four Orcs and three Beastmen in already contained. MLB's warband, however, only contained four ghouls and a level five wizard. So far things were looking a little one sided.

Initially, we looked at a scenario in which the warbands ambush a Dwarven caravan. This would allow us to focus our attention on the dwarves if we wanted and allow both sides to grab some victory points. We the considered it would be more natural if the two warbands teamed up to carry out the ambush, instead of coincidentally attacking the same caravan at the same time. It was then that we hit on a more ambitious idea.

The Realms of Chaos books don't just contain the rules for Chaos Warbands, but also the rules for full sized Warhammer Armies in the 3rd edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle. In addition to the usual mix of units, characters and monsters, these armies can also contain randomly generated warbands. These can be generated specifically for the army or part of an existing campaign. What is more, these warbands can gain rewards and followers from fighting in battles as part of the army. We had our solution. Our warbands would combine and, bulked up with additional troops from my Chaos collection, we would play out a full 1000 point 3rd edition Warhammer campaign.

The next question was who to use as an opponent. The Dwarves were an obvious choice. Having been a dwarf player for around fifteen years now I have plenty of models and the dwarf army list hasn't changed dramatically since third edition. However, MLB has been slowly buying up Perry miniatures War of the Roses infantry with the intention of building a cheaper Empire army and this looked like an ideal opportunity to give them a test run. Plus, Empire vs Chaos felt like a more natural and classic lineup for our first full scale 3rd edition battle.

So with the forces decided, it was time to draw up some army lists.