Allegiance question

[derek]

Hey guys so I'm still slightly confused by the alliegances in matched play. So if I play skaven am I able to say I want my army to be a blanket skaven army and be able to bring in their battle line troops which would be blocks of clanrats right?

[Tamwulf]

You could have a Skaven army containing only those models with the keyword "Skaven"- they would count as having the Skaven Allegiance. It could contain models from the other clans, but only as long as they had the Skaven keyword.

 

Think of it as a hierarchy:

 

Chaos

    |

Skaven

    |

Clans

    |

 <specific keywords like 'Giant Rat' or 'Monster' or 'Hero'>

 

To have a Chaos allegiance, is only to have the keyword Chaos on the warscroll. To have a Skaven allegiance, all the warscrolls must have the Skaven keyword. To have a specific Clan allegiance, all the warscrolls must have the Clan name. You can skip down the Hierarchy, but you can't skip up. That is, not all Clan allegiance will automatically have Skaven or Chaos allegiance because they may be missing those keywords. But a Chaos allegiance could have specific Clans that were not Skaven.

 

You have to be careful though. Some Skaven warscrolls do not have the Skaven keyword on them, such as Giant Rats. Their keywords are Chaos, Moulder, Giant Rats, meaning that you could never take them in a Skaven allegiance army, but you could in a Chaos allegiance army, or a Clan Moulder allegiance Army, or a Giant Rats allegiance army.

 

I didn't look at all the Skaven warscrolls, but it looked like they all contained the keyword Chaos. Any Skaven allegiance army you make will at least have the Chaos Allegiance. 

 

Still confused?

 

Clanrats have the keywords Chaos, Skaven, Verminus, Clanrats, but under the Chaos Pitched Battle Profiles on pg. 130 of the Generals Handbook, they have a battlefield role of Battleline with no qualifiers. Like the entire army doesn't have to have a specific Allegiance for the Clanrats to be a Battleline. So you could make a Skaven Army with the Keywords Chaos, and Skaven, and use Clanrats as your Battleline. You would NOT be able to claim Clan Eshin or Clan Skrye as your Allegience as you don't have the proper Battlelines for them (as well as containing models without the keywords Clan Eshin or Clan Skrye). 

 

Side note: If you make a Skaven allegiance army, you can go further down the hierarchy if you want to include a specific warscroll Battelion like the Warscroll of Eshin Clawpack without making your entire army a Clan Eshin allegiance. Then you could use that warscroll Battelion if you added 1 Skaven Assassin, 3 units of Night Runners, and 1 unit of Gutter Runners. They all have the Skaven keyword. 

 

I hope that helped.