Alternate 8th Edition DoC army book, The definitive Daemon re-write.

* If TheRealVeon provides us with an updated file for the Designer's Notes based on these findings/suggestions by JonathanC I will be able to mail it in the morning to my wife's office - just to let you guys know the 'window' still stands!

Karanak
Look if the only reason we're talking about this issue is the simple fact that me and my friends have misunderstood what 'closed lists' means it might not need changing to begin with, and even if we change it I actually Think that we should simply update the PDF (the digital version at RealVeon's disposal) and don't bother mentioning it in the Designer's Notes errata.

Let's look at it as we're simply streamlining the mechanic to work in the same way that WitchHunters function - so it's not gonna be a jaw-dropper if that bit is changed in the final version of our rewrite 6 months down the line!

Icon of Stench
Right so with the current wording High Elves (and their SoA) would simply ignore the effect of this Icon. Surely, they are effected by 'Noxious Vapours' though, right?
Again, either we simply leave this bit alone all together, or we change its mechanic to be identical to the 'Noxious Vapours' Gift - and let's not say anything about it in the Designer's Notes 'Errata'.

These details were really nit-picking to begin with. I Think we have the important things covered in the 'Errata' already - and each new entry there sort of diminishes the general impression of Appendix A so I'd say let's refrain from adding more stuff there unless absolutely Paramount (even the bit about Epidemius's Tally and the Daemonic (Nurgle) Special Rule is on the verge, I'd say - but now that we've put it in there let's keep it of course!).

Adding dates for the 3 test games we've conducted so far is not a bad idea I guess.
My first game (vs Empire) was on the 29th of April 2012.
My second game (vs VC) was on the 11th of May 2012.

Okay, here's the latest Army Book pdf:

http://www.mediafire.com/?3j6kr3tjc8b4tl9

and the latest Designer's Notes pdf:

http://www.mediafire.com/?fj06v3viyf3fl69

I'll check back later tonight to see if there are any final changes to the notes.

* Page 1 Updated.

Designer's Notes will be 'sent to print' 8 hours from Now.

I talked with a friend about our little project and he had some concerns about the Nurgle Signature Spell.

He felt that the Miasma was too powerful and the spell should just reduce Toughness at the base level and all of them at the boosted level. He said that there was no spell he knew of that reduced five characteristics at its base level.

At the very least, he believed that any characteristic reduction was permanent unless stated otherwise, so it may be best no matter what we decide, to state that the spell lasts until the start of the caster's next magic phase.

We have 'nerfed' the Miasma of Pestilence conciderably already. It used to reduce all those Stats to 1 now we're only talking about by 1 for the nominal version and D3 for the Boosted version.
So with regards to that I am simply forced to disagree with your friend, I'm afraid. Frankly, I don't believe 'uniqueness' to be an argument either.

Is your friend familiar with the current Miasma spell of the present Daemons of Chaos 7th Ed Army Book? And more importantly: Does he have any experience of playing against that Book in 8th Edition where people have started using Miasma as 'Signature Spell' to a large extent (i.e. without applying the Heavy nerfing that we have applied!) ??

That being said, it's good that this was brought up because [god damn it!] you're right: We have simply 'forgotten' to add the 'until the start of the caster's next magic phase'-clause in the description of the Mechanic.

As it reads right now, and as your friend read it I suppose, it's a permanent effect (i.e. every model in base Contact have their stats permanently reduced!) - and I can certainly see why he would object to that(!)
... Because it's wrong. And in my mind it was never the intention, and I can't Believe that we have all been browsing right past this blatant error in our proof-reading. It just goes to show how damn hard it is to get every detail right - because your brain starts telling you to not bother even looking at things that 'cannot be wrong'..
Like the Miasma of Pestilence, for example: We all know the basic premise of the mechanic from our current official army book - all we did was seriously tone down the 'strength' of that mechanic.. and then the [obvious] 'until the start of the caster's next magic phase' was simply lost in the transition.

That one definately needs to go into the Errata of the Designer's Notes. There's no other way to go about it at this Point. I don't know if that will satisfy your friend's concerns as far as the rest of the mechanic goes, but I certainly hope so.

I was going to send the latest version of the Designer's Notes off with my wife just now, but since I was clever enough to check this thread for updates I can now put things on hold until this matter has been tended to.

By the way, the suggestion of the Miasma only reducing Toughness at its nominal casting value is not crazy. But a simply -1 would not suffice I Think, instead we'd have to go back to the old mechanic of Toughness being reduced to one. I have to say though that I would want to conduct some serious playtesting before taking this particular bit any further.

EDIT
This is how the Miasma of Pestilence 'mechanic' should read, in my opinion:

I think its pretty clear that he hasn't encountered that spell before. Probably because I don't actually have an Nurgle daemons (with the exception of some leftover Nurgling bases a 40k player gave me). Mostly because of price reasons and I think the GW GUO model is hideous.

But otherwise you make good points, so my only remaining concern is the duration of the spell which you have factored in nicely. The only thing I would change is to say that the characteristics are reduced for the duration of the spell instead of temporarily, which being an indefinite amount of time could lead to confusion.

Sorry to delay the printing of the notes. I'm even more sorry to say that I don't think we really need to include the change stated above since augments and hex spells are only supposed to last until the caster's next magic phase anyway so we really don't need to put such a clarification in the errata. So you can go ahead and print out and send off the notes and pdf whenever you please.

Are you sure?
It would seem to me that there's always a very specific wording in each given spell stating the duration of that spell. The duration of the spell is not part of the basic casting requirements in the Basic Rulebook either.
I could be wrong.. But I'm still rather certain we actually need to include the 'until the start of the caster's next magic phase'-clause in order for this spell to be correctly defined.

However, if you are 100% certain that there's a paragraph in the BRB that clearly says something like: 'Unless otherwise noted, Augments and Hexes are Always assumed to last until the start of the Caster's Next Magic Phase' - then we do not need to add it of course.

But I doubt this paragraph exists because why on god's green Earth does every other Augment/Hex carry these very specifically stipulated individual durations in that case?

Swapping 'temporarily' with 'for the duration of the spell' is a good call though.

edit - Actually, since the duration of the spell is already defined (either in plain text or by some general rule about Augment/Hexes that I have missed so far) it might be better to say:

I know this wording is sort of convuloted.. But it doesn't seem to leave any room for misinterpretation at least.

No worries! It's very fortunate that this bit came up in the last minute. Better now than later. Unless someone has cast Birona's Timewarp on you I'm pretty sure this means we'll be Printing the Notes tomorrow (and not today as my wife is probably on her way home any minute now..) but I'd much rather have this delay than leave an inconsistency like this unattended.

EDIT
Tomorrow is the 6th of June and that's a holiday in Sweden.. So the next opportunity to get a nice double-page print of the Designer's Notes is on Thursday I'm afraid.

Not sure how we missed this one, guess we must have just assumed it was right becuase we all know how the spell works!

Adding "until the start of the caster's next magic phase." to the end of the first paragraph should be sufficient in my mind to clear this. If you want to add some way of specifying models are only affected whilst in base contact then I see no harm in it, providing you can come up with a non-convoluted wording, otherwise I'm not sure I'd bother.

I had a look in the BRB to see if there was a general ruling on duration of Hexes and Augments, but it looks like they have to be specified for each spell. Going by the rules in the BRB, I couldn't determine whether Miasma as we have it worded currently is a permanent effect or if it 'switches off' right after the spell is cast!

As for the spell being too powerful, it might be worth pointing out to your friend that all other augments usually have a range of at least 18" and affect whole units. The way Miasma works it has no effect on models making supporting attacks, for example. He may be right that reducing that many stats is too powerful for its casting cost, but thats something more playtesting and opinions are needed for before I would make any changes to it. If we do decide to nerf it further, I would probably remove Attacks as one of the stats affected to keep its casting cost low. Not a change I'd want to make unless I had to so we'll just keep an eye on this for the future.

Looking at some of the other spells, I noticed Pit of Slime says it lasts until the end of the next magic phase, but it should probably say the start of the next magic phase too. Same for Supreme Temptations, Succor of Chaos and Gift of Chaos, neither of which specify start or end of phase.

Shame to delay things again but its probably for the best.

Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking with respect to hexes/augments. I certainly can't find the reference I was thinking of, so just disregard my ramblings about that.

So your final correction it will probably be sufficient to just condense both contingencies and say that they remain affected as long as they are in base contact.

I'll also fix the other spells Jonathan listed and put those into the errata straight away.

Excellent!
And let's look on the Bright side! - In half a year from now (when I make us a new hard-copy of the PDF) we may actually succeed in creating an Army Book that doesn't need a single Errata/FAQ entry. Something GW has officially never been able to do!

It's good we caught these things, and all things concidered being 'delayed' to the end of this week really isn't the end of the World.

Even if you won't get it printed out for a few days, here the updated notes with all the Errata:

http://www.mediafire.com/?dja2dwv2i8jil9g

and to go with it here is the updated army book as well:

http://www.mediafire.com/?h5zmxogdp5775k1

Awesome-sause!
Page one updated!
Will download and digest this afternoon as I am still at work, as per normal nightshift rules..

EDIT
Just looked through the new versions of the two documents. You sorted out the stuff we have discussed as of late of course. Tomorrow my wife will hopefully have time to produce that double-paged print-out of the Designer's Notes.

When you recieve your copy of the PDF in the mail I Think there'll be some other minor tweaks that you will want to make. One thing I have noticed, for example, is that some of the fluff-boxes in the Bestiary Section have 'small text' almost to the Point where it's hard to read them - my Eye-sight is perfect so I really have no problem with this, but anyone needing glasses is probably gonna have problems there.. hehe
You got about 6 months to tend to Little aesethethic matters like that however. Just something I wanted to mention because this post was looking sort of superflous now that I saw it after having slept a few hours.. *haha*

I just thought I would pop in here to say I received my copy of the book today and it looks great. Took it to my club and whilst I didn't get a chance to show it to people in detail a few were curious about it, so maybe I will get to do some more playtest games with it soon.

As soon as I can find the time I'll give it a thorough read-through to see if I can spot anything else that could be improved, since things like this always look different in print to how they do on the screen.

Good to hear your got the parcel I sent you JonathanC! I guess having a 'hard copy' of the PDF makes it a bit more accessible to 'outsiders' - and play-test games is something we can't get too much of really so that's sounding good too.

I don't Think theRealVeon's copy should be too far Away from reaching him either at this Point. Probably only a few Days off..

By the way, if you're wondering why there's a bunch of capital letters popping up in my Writing as of late.. This is because my wife has installed a trial beta version of Windows 8 on our computer here at home.. and I don't know what's happened really but for some reason there's an 'autocorrect' function running that seems to Think certain Words should be spelt with capital letters (like 'Think', for example, it's not a noun and not even a Word in Swedish-- *wtf*)

So that's really annoying. And I could say they same for Windows 8 actually. It just seems they've changed a bunch of stuff (from Windows 7) for no good reason other than wanting to change crap..

Oh well..

Anyway, she's Printing two copies of the Designer's Notes this afternoon though - or said she would at any rate - so the 'package' will go out with the mail tomorrow.

****************************************************************************
EDIT

So my Lovely wife did indeed print a nice full-color double-page hard-copy of the Designer's Notes. It's all packed up and ready to go out with the mail first thing in the morning.. about 10 hours from now.

I did add a small handwritten note to Jervis where I included some private Contact information in the off-chance that he'll have any direct feedback for us. I did naturally underscore that any such Contact will handled with extreme confidentiality - so yeah it's something I would tell about in a PM should it occur, but I wouldn't put it on display here in the thread.

On that note I actually Think from this Point on we should try and minimize the public exposure of this Project. About a year ago I started a thread about this Project on the whineseer rules-development forum, for example, which feels like a dumb thing to have done really.. That thread is all forgotten now of course, all I'm saying is I wouldn't do it again Now..

I know it's probably pretty vain to Think like this, but the less "known" the details of this Project is to the general Warhammer-crowd, the easier it will be for GW to make use of its contents.

Anyway, tomorrow, June 8th (my b-day incidentally) I'll ship out the main package to Games Workshop. How about that ey guys! Cue the Epic Music someone!!

It's been a real treat, this Project. I know it ain't exactly over either, but I just feel like saying it once more. All contributors, JonathanC and TheRealVeon in particular, have made this feeble Little thread of mine a really extraordinary experience - whatever the outcome may be, whether or not anything gets impemented or not by GW, I Think we've truly set a new standard for "fan-made" re-writes globally and for all armies.

Now we move into the play-test stage. Let's simply try to squeeze in as many games as we can over the next 6 months!

Cheers!

*************************************************************************
EDIT

Package sent to Games Workshop! Destined to arrive by the middle of next week. Let's hope Jervis Johnson hasn't gone on his vacation yet!

****************************************************************************
EDIT

This evening Brynolf (mostly) was Reading through the printed out version of the re-write at our club-house and he remarked a two minor issues of wording, both of which are cases where I kinda agree with him that we can tidy things up a Little bit:

First Instance:
p. 55 - The Mechanic for Soccour of Chaos:
Succour of Chaos is an augment spell with a range of 18". The target unit’s attacks ignore their opponent’s Armour saves until the beginning of the caster’s next Magic phase. If the enemy would have already been denied their Armour saves before the spell’s eff ect took place (eg, the unit’s strength is enough to negate the enemy’s armour, the Armour Piercing special rule, etc), then the target unit may re–roll failed To Wound rolls instead.

My (and Brynolf's) suggestion for 'clean-up' is as follows:
Succour of Chaos is an augment spell with a range of 18". The target unit’s close-combat attacks ignore Armour saves until the beginning of the caster’s next Magic phase. If the enemy already did not have an Armour save before the spell’s effect took place (eg, the enemy unit has no armour, the unit’s strength is enough to negate the enemy’s armour, the Armour Piercing special rule, etc), then the target unit may re–roll failed To Wound rolls instead.

Second Instance:
p. 56 - The Mechanic for Glean Magic:
Glean Magic is a hex spell which targets an enemy Wizard within 24". If it is successfully cast, the controlling player may choose any one of the target’s spells; the unboosted version of that spell is immediately cast by the friendly Wizard (without rolling any additional dice). No dispel attempts may be made against the opponent’s spell which is being cast in this way.

My suggestion for clean-up:
Glean Magic is a hex spell which targets an enemy Wizard within 24". If it is successfully cast, the casting Wizard may choose any one of the target’s spells; the unboosted version of that spell is immediately cast by the casting Wizard (without rolling any additional dice). No dispel attempts may be made against the target's spell as it is being cast in this way.

So yeah.. Both of these 'findings' are really minute details I guess. I hope you guys actually spot the subtle differences between the Writing as we have it now, and my suggested Little tweaks.

It goes without saying that the mechanics are written 'correctly' already as they are. I.e. you can't really misunderstand them. But with Soccour of Chaos it reads almost as though you have to actually have an armour saving throw (that gets negated) in order for the re-rolls ToWound to occour (where-as in my tweaked version of the wording it is clear that you also get those re-rolls if the opponant simply doesn't have any armour to begin with!).
In the case of Glean Magic it's simply a matter of "casting wizard" and "casting player" looking more official/correct compared to mixing in descriptions like "controlling player" and "friendly wizard" (although the portent is of course unchanged).

This is obviously not an Errata matter and I wouldn't have mentioned it there even if we hadn't already sent the package off to GW. I would however change it in the updated PDF so that the next time we print it out these Little details are straightened out.

Other than this, Brynolf did not spot any fallacies that we have not already spotted ourselves.

I got home last night to find that my book had finally come. I am very happy with how things turned out. Everything looks really, really fantastic and you did an excellent job, DaemonReign, of getting the final product put together. And great job to everyone involved.

I'll put in Brynolf and your suggested changes as well as fix a few tiny errors I've spotted myself (just incorrect tense on some verbs and things like that; nothing significant). Also looking at a few of the pictures, some of them are clearly too dark. The Lord of Change and the collar area of the Juggernauts for example. I've just been using my home ink printer which doesn't have very good resolution and thus everything looks much lighter than what a professional printer can do. So now that I have this reference, I'll be able to make some final tweaks to that as well.

I'll be back with an updated pdf once all those changes have been implemented.

Also, Adobe will soon be issuing a new version of InDesign (the document layout program I used for the pdf) and hopefully they will have fixed the pdf exporting feature. That means that I will be able to make an interactive pdf. Basically all of the cross-references (see page X) and the table of contents will work like internet links. You just click on the text and it takes you right to the reference. Hopefully that will be done in a month or two.