Last week I did a product review of the Arcane Journal – Razing of the Westerland for Warhammer The Old World. One of the new things brought into The Old World in that Arcane Journal are the Path to Glory campaign rules. As I noted in the review the name re-uses the name of a campaign book that came out in a White Dwarf back in 6th Edition, way back in 2002, Path to Glory. I wondered if I still had my copy and lo and behold not only do I still have it it is in perfect condition!
Flipping through the pages took me down memory lane and reminded me this was a fun little ruleset. Unlike the current Path to Glory this booklet is all about Chaos armies allowing you to create warbands of Chaos Warriors, Beastmen, and if you are lucky even daemons!
Each Warband starts with a Chaos Hero on foot for no Favor Points. From there you can spend Favor Points to add a steed if you want and buy the rest of the Warband. You start with 35 Favor Points which can be used for quite a few things. There are two troops charts you can roll on. One chart has standard infantry, such as Beastmen, Warriors, and Chaos Warriors, warhounds, and marauder Horsemen. The other chariot has things such as Chaos Knights, Chosen Knights, Chosen Warriors, Ogres, Chaos Trolls, Minotaur’s, Spawns or even a Sorcerer! In order to roll on the first chart you need to pay a Favor Point and the second chart costs 2 Favor Points. You then need to spend the requisite Favor Points to purchase the models. The nice thing is if you don’t like the unit you rolled you can pay Favor Points to adjust the roll and get something you would like!
In the game big models and characters are used as Individual Characters, infantry models are formed into skirmishing units and anything else on a base bigger than 25mm are ranked up, i.e. cavalry.
As your games progress you earn additional favor points, both for completing universal tasks such as winning the game and killing enemies, and god specific tasks such as killing characters with magic (Tzeentch), killing characters or models with 3 or more wounds (Nurgle) and so on. As you gain Favor Points you can purchase more models by rolling on the unit charts. When you gain 6 Favor Points you can roll on the appropriate Advancement Chart. You don’t use your Favor Points to roll, it’s just a method for determining when you get to roll. Some of the advancements are the same across the gods, and others are deity specific. Like the unit chart you can spend Favor Points to adjust your roll. You might want to save a Favor Point in case you manage to turn yourself into a Chaos Spawn! You can also ascend to Daemonhood which is definitely the better option!
While the booklet is only 11 pages it is chock full of converted and painted Warbands that can provide inspiration for modern players. While Games Workshop doesn’t support this type of conversion to this level anymore they do still print reader armies and I could see something like this featuring even in modern publications!
I love that they had an in store competition for Path to Glory with the winner getting a special edition Chaos Champion! Does anyone know which model this was? I’d guess it was one of the Games Day models that came out back in the day but it would be neat to know for sure!
The booklet also contains reference to future issues of White Dwarf having extra rules, but as I haven’t been able to figure out which issue this came with I haven’t been able to dig up the extra rules. Even without the extra rules I think this is a fun set and can easily be used with The Old World as it doesn’t rely on points costs, just models. Will it be evenly balanced? No, but then again it wasn’t balanced for 6th edition either! I’d love to get my buddies to give this a try for sure!
If you are interested in this classic rule set I managed to find a PDF here!
-Wachtmeister
The Wachtmeister's Patrol 