Chanting Conquest

Alright fellow dinosaur enthusiasts we have another update and another rework to the chant system. This iteration is a bit simpler but also offers a robust array of benefits to each unit.

Let’s restart from the very top with how chanting works and what we are even doing here. The chant system is the army special rule for W’adrhun and offers a set benefit depending on which cults you have available as well as additional benefits for most regiments when they chant. There are now also additional rules that provide additional or modified benefits when you chant.

To begin we need to talk about creating chant markers as these markers are the currency used to chant the battle cry. The naming system used is a little bit awkward as we have “Chant in Sequence” the rule used to let us put markers down and “Chant the Battlecry” the rule used to let us spend said markers.

Chant in Sequence is the basic rule for adding markers to the table. You get one marker when a card is drawn from your activation stack as long as that card is currently on the table. The type of token you add is the same as the cult that regiment follows. Most regiments follow the cult you selected for the character whose warband the regiment belongs to. Some regiments, namely the various Chosen, always follow whatever cult is in their name.

An important note here Characters *can* add a marker the turn the regiment they are attached to enters the battlefield so long as the regiment marched on from reinforcements prior to you drawing the character. This can be important in the early game.

Once you’ve got a marker you add it to your pool. All types of markers go into the same pool. You may NEVER have more than 3 markers at a given time. If you have 3 markers prior to drawing a card you may choose to discard one from the pool or keep the 3 you have and discard the new one.

Now that we’ve got 3 markers we can Chant the Battlecry! In order to chant the battlecry you must discard at least 2 markers of the same cult. You may discard 3 but there is no benefit to doing so. All effects currently available to W’adrhun trigger off of 2 markers being discarded. When you Chant the battlecry the third marker that you don’t use is immediately discarded as Unsung. Whenever you chant the battlecry you will always return to zero markers unless you have taken the History Mastery.

Now lets look at our benefits:

Famine	Death	War	Conquest
Dread	Deadly Blades	Cleave 1	Evasion +2 (max of 3)

Compared to the old systems this is simple and easy. Discard 2 tokens of a type get that benefit. So way do we have to have 3 tokens to chant if we only need to spend 2? I lean towards the requirement of 3 being a limiting factor on how many times per turn we can trigger a chant while only needing the pair to actually buy a benefit making it much more feasible to mix cults in the army.

BUT WAIT! There’s more! The majority of W’adrhun regiments have on their profile a special rule with the [CHANT] tag. Those rules are triggered IN ADDITION TO the base cult benefit. Let’s look at an example with the humble Braves.

Braves have a chant rule called “Blood to be Spilled” which gives the regiment the impact +2 special rule when they chant the Battlecry. This means that if our Braves were to have chanted from the cult of war they would gain Cleave 1 AND impact +2. Also remember any characters that are in the regiment gain these bonuses as well as these are rules gained during the game.

There are also a couple of unique [CHANT] rules that apply beyond just the stand that has the rule. “Predatory Shriek” on the Winglord Predatory is the most notable as this rule applies to ALL [SPEAKERS] monsters. These effects are additive so if you have a list with both a Winglord and say a Tontorr – when the Tontorr chants it will receive the benefits from the cult it chanted from, the [CHANT] it always has – “Dominating Presence”, AND Predatory Shriek.

A quick note since I haven’t talked about Conquest markers at all. Conquest markers are still basically wild cards that can be converted to 1 to 1 to a marker of any other cult as you need. To chant from the Cult of Conquest directly does require the use of Conquest markers so if you’ve been out of the game awhile that might be a change.

Since I mentioned it early the History mastery can be taken by any character (except the Winglord) for the low cost of 5 points once per round you can save one of those Unsung markers you’ll have by placing it back in your pool as a FAMINE marker. This is great value for 5 points and with the change to only needing a matching pair of markers to pay for you benefits is pretty much always useful. History is also one of the always active abilities that functions regardless of whether the character that has it is on the battlefield or has been destroyed.

Let’s walk through a couple of examples

1. We draw a Braves card from our deck and activate a Braves regiment that follows the Cult of War. We add a marker to our otherwise empty pool and have 1 war marker. We don’t have 3 markers so we can’t chant.
2. We have a War marker in our pool and draw a Blooded card opting to activate a Blooded regiment that follows the Cult of War. We add a marker to our pool and now have 2 War markers. While we could pay for the benefit we do not have 3 markers and thus cannot chant.
3. We have a Famine and a Death marker in our pool. We draw a Raptor Riders card and activate a Raptor Riders regiment that follows the Cult of War. We add a War token to our pool bringing us to 3 Markers. We could Chant as we have 3 markers but with no matching pair we are unable to pay for a chant so we, alas, can not chant.
4. We have 2 War markers in our pool. We draw a Chieftain card and our Chieftain follows the cult of Death. We add a Death marker to our pool bringing use to 3 with a matching pair! We could chant except the Chieftain is a character and characters do not chant on their own unless they are also their own regiment.
5. We have a Death and a War marker in our pool and we draw a Braves card activating a regiment that follows the cult of War. This gives us our second War marker bringing us to a total of 3 with a pair of War markers. Finally we can chant! We pay for the cult of war benefit gaining both cleave 1 rule from the Cult of War and the impact +2 special rule from the Brave’s [chant] rule. Our death marker is now discarded as unsung emptying our pool
6. We have a Famine Marker and a Conquest marker. We draw a Winglord Predator card activating our Winglord who follows the cult of Death. This brings us to 3 markers and we can chant. As the winglord is a regiment by itself it is allowed to chant the battlecry. Here we have a decision to make. We have 1 death marker, 1 famine marker, and a conquest marker that we can convert to either. Unless a regiment has the “Cultists of…” special rule it is not limited as far as which cult it can chant from. In this case we decide we would rather have the DREAD special rule and opt to convert our conquest marker into a famine marker. This gives us 2 famine markers with which to pay for Dread, we gain terrifying +1 from Predatory Shriek, and then discard our lonely death marker as unsung. But wait! We have a Matriarch Queen with the History mastery. We can decide spend the use of that mastery for this round to save our marker. Our unsung Death marker is converted into a Famine marker and added back to our pool.

That’s probably enough examples for the moment. There are a few supremacies and artifacts that still add additional benefits to chants that we can cover in at a later time. Hopefully this article helps anyone questioning their sanity on how chants function currently. I think the new system offers a lot of possibilities and feels more open as far as cult choices than the previous iteration.

-Apex Chinchilla