Codex: Lost and the Damned - Designer's Notes

I just wanted to share some thoughts on the Lost and the Damned codex from my perspective, shedding some light on why some choices were made and why others weren't.

From the beginning, the project was defined at least as much by what it was NOT going to try to be as it was by what it was trying to be.

It was not trying to "fix" Codex: Chaos Space Marines.

It was not trying to represent any single force, like an Alpha Legion cell or the Blood Pact - such forces could be made, but no single one would be the focus, and units would generally be kept generic.


It was not trying to represent any and everything else out in the universe - Tau auxiliaries, Kroot mercenaries, Eldar Corsairs, etc. - this was going to be focused on the human and semi-human servants of the powers of Chaos. 

The prime inspiration was the old Codex: Eye of Terror list for Lost and the Damned, which had some units of its own and allowed you to pull in IG, CSM, and daemon unit types to represent a wide range of armies.  In keeping with trying to keep the army fairly broad, I wanted to keep that aspect, pulling from the various other available books rather than reinventing the wheel or making some kind of different Chaos Marines or Daemons.

Once that decision was made, the big questions became:

• What to include from the other books?
• What to leave out?
• How to resolve conflicts (different daemons and summoning rules from Codex: CSM and Codex: Daemons, two types of Daemon Princes, etc.)?
• How to handle interactions?  Where should they be forbidden, where should they be allowed, where should they be encouraged?  
• How to handle potential imbalances?
• How to add some flavor specific to the codex so that it's not solely a combo of the other books?  I wanted it to be possible to run an entirely LatD army without pulling any units over from other books.  It may not be the most powerful build available, but it should be possible.
• How to represent a wide range of potential forces while giving incentives for more narrowly themed armies?  Part of this was also to try to allow as many 3rd-ed LatD armies to transition over to this codex as painlessly and completely as possible.

The various choices made throughout the codex reflect these questions, and my attempts to answer them satisfactorily.  The hardest parts for me was trying to balance allowing as much variety as possible without either drowning in choice and confusion or making something that would be simply a more powerful version of Imperial Guard, etc.  At the end of the day, Codex: Lost and the Damned should be a viable choice, but you should still have reasons to use Codex: Imperial Guard, Codex: Chaos Space Marines, or Codex: Daemons too.  I hope that it has come close to that ideal.