After assembling the chaos/blood warriors I was keen to move on to the characters. The Lord with his hound and the standard bearer are truly magnificent sculpts. The quality of the casting is first class and the engineering is quite mind blowing. There are few, if any, in the industry that can match this kind of level. The figures are mounted on mdf bases, these will have thin magnetic sheet attached to the underside for use in movement trays.
If you are careful you can rank up the warriors and the characters so that they combine into one unit like this. In Warhammer game terms, this is a unit of 12 Chosen Warriors. All my existing chaos warrior units I field six wide, so I wanted to repeat that with these figures. With two such imposing characters in the unit I don't think they can be anything less than the Chosen Few. The guy in the back row on the left is an old metal champion, he's a bit short really, even standing on a rock slate. There is one remaining plastic figure from the boxset, armed with a whip, but I will probably be using him in the regiment of marauders as he's fairly lightly armoured.
In other gaming systems, the unit can be used in different ways. In Dragon Rampant, units of hard hitting warriors are six strong, so the basic five warriors plus the standard bearer can be used. In Saga, elite units are just four strong, maybe the character model with hound could be a warlord. In element based games, like Kings of War or Hail Caesar, then obviously the whole unit is deployed as above, takes a certain number of hits and is then removed. Being able to switch from skirmish to ranked and back again, I see that as being easier on these square bases. Flexibility across different systems is important to me, you never know what the latest must-play game will require. Hopefully these square bases will give me options in just about any gaming system.
