Rivals format has quickly become one of the most popular ways to play Warhammer Underworlds, thanks to the fact you can pick up and play with a warband’s faction cards (or one of the various universal Rivals decks if you prefer). Even in other formats, the cards we’ll cover in this article are vital to how the warband plays. The Gorechosen of Dromm were the final warband to drop during the Nethermaze season, formed of 3 tough-as-nails Khorne fighters.
If you’re looking for advice on how to play with this warband, then you’re in luck. Within no time you’ll be able to shed plenty of blood as an offering for the blood god.
Strategy
How they play
The Gorechosen of Dromm are an elite, Khorne themed warband, which you may assume to be a fairly straightforward aggressive theme, but there’s actually a little more to them than meets the eye. Instead of just running directly towards the nearest enemy fighter, you’ll actually want to hold the center of the board (specifically being within 1 hex of no one’s territory), and force the enemy to come to you.
The Gorechosen of Dromm can struggle a bit against some other elite/harder hitting warbands (looking at you, Morgok’s Krushas), but are perfectly designed to bully around larger warbands with weaker fighters, and are particularly interesting against objective-based warbands.
Inspire mechanic
This leads us into the next core mechanic behind the Gorechosen of Dromm: Blood tithe. Each member or the warband inspires when they have three or more blood tithe counters on their fighter card.
To quickly summarise, each fighter gains a blood tithe counter at the start of the game, as well as an additional one whenever that fighter either deals damage or receives damage.
Basically, as long as someone’s getting hurt, your fighters are going to inspire.
Fighters
The Gorechosen are a fairly slow warband, with two fighters starting with 3 move, and one on 4 (thankfully all upgrading to 4 move when inspired. You’re generally also going to be rolling a low number of dice on everything, with 1 defence dice and each fighter having mostly 2 attack dice. That said, there are plenty of cards to enhance your attacks and deal additional damage.
Dromm, Wounder of Worlds is your warband leader. His Bloodblessed Axe & Staff attack is an incredibly handy range 2 attack, allowing you to hit hard while staying just out of reach. More importantly though, Dromm has the Enrage ability, which allows you to spend a blood tithe counter in order to force a visible fighter to charge. That fighter gets +1 dice, but also staggered afterwards.
This is interesting because there are two completely different ways you might want to use it. The first way you can use it is to select one of your own fighters and make a charge for that +1 dice bonus, and be mindful that they are then staggered. But this ability also means you can choose an enemy fighter to charge. It might feel a little weird for you to allow your opponent to attack on your turn, but if you know your opponent is intentionally squatting on objectives or trying to stay away from you, then you can force them out of that safe position, and right where you want them (and even if you take some damage, that fighter then gains a blood tithe counter).
The Gorehulk is likely to be a vital part of your gameplan. When inspired, he jumps up from 5 to 6 wounds, meaning he can take a hell of a beating (and dish one out too). His Crushing Grip attack is the one you’ll probably find yourself using most often, dealing a punishing 3 damage. The Choking Grip attack is a little weaker, but has stagger (and ensnare when inspired) and allows you to give the target a move token, and the ability to remove a blood tithe counter to deal an additional damage.
Unfortunately, the way that move tokens work have been updated as of Gnarlwood, meaning that this doesn’t pin that opponent down completely, but it does still prevent them from making a charge.
And finally you have Skullgrinder Herax. His attack comes with stagger, which is really useful in a warband like this with a low number of dice, and you can spend a blood tithe counter to upgrade his attack to range 2.
Key Cards and How to Use Them
Collecting blood tithe counters
In case it wasn’t already clear, blood tithe counters are a core element of how the Gorechosen of Dromm play. If you’re getting stuck in and fighting then [A Worthy Offering] and [The Blood God’s Due] are both going to be relatively easy cards to score.
Grim satisfaction is a little more interesting though, as it requires you to balance both blood tithe counters and wound counters, up to a total of eight. If you get this card in your initial hand, you’ll almost certainly want to re-draw, but if you save The Gorehulk’s blood tithe tokens carefully, this is certainly possible to score in round 2 or 3.
Holding the centre line
When setting up the board, you always want to ensure there’s at least one objective within 1 hex of no-one’s territory.
There are a few great cards that rely on you being right in the middle of the two boards. Consecrated in Blood is the main one, giving you 2 glory for being on an objective within 1 hex of no one’s territory. It does require your opponent not being on any objectives, but if they are, then Dromm’s Enrage action or the various domain cards in your deck can all help. There’s also Blood Claim which is similar, but even easier to score.
If you’re already floating around no-one’s territory, then Worshipped in Battle is almost guaranteed to score. But the real fun comes in when you draw the card Wound the Realm, which allows you to deal 1 damage to a fighter near no-one’s territory, with the option to remove Dromm’s blood tithe counters to deal 1 damage to all fighters in that zone. This will hurt your own fighters too, but it allows you to potentially wreak havoc on your opponent, especially if they have some vulnerable fighters in that area. It can also be used to set yourself up to score A Puissant Strike.
Using blood tithe counters
Once you’ve racked up enough blood tithe counters to inspire your fighters, you’ll want to start using them. Thankfully by that point you should have scored some glory too, meaning you can think about using cards such as Paragon of Slaughter which gives you a choice of healing 1 or drawing another power card – both amazing options to have available.
Personally I’d suggest it’s worth keeping at least one fighter with as many counters as possible (usually for me this is The Gorehulk). As well as helping to score Grim Satisfaction which was mentioned earlier, it’s also going to make Wrath Incarnate into an incredible card. With 3+ glory, you can’t be driven back, have +1 move and gain +1 damage.
I want to also give a special mention to Overhead Smash as being the most fun card in the deck. Using this card forces your opponent into either moving their fighter away from The Gorehulk (if they even can), or taking 2 damage if they stay where they are – upgraded to an insane 3 damage if you spend a blood tithe counter.
Staying alive
You may have a lot of wounds to burn through, but your fighters don’t have many defence dice which means stronger warbands can wear you down quickly. Thankfully there are a number of cards to help boost that survivability. The main one of these is Skin of Brass which reduces damage to one of your fighters.
Final Frenzy is a brilliant card to have when you know a fighter is near death. Play this card and you can guarantee the fighter will survive until the end of the round and continue to cause trouble for your opponent.
Another fun card (although a little less reliable) is White-hot Anger, which means Herax can make each hex around him into a lethal hex, following a successful friendly attack. Being the weakest of the 4 fighters, Herax is often a big target for your opponent, so this card makes punishes them for trying to get too close.
Take the advice in this article and apply it to your own games and you might just make Khorne proud.
How have you been finding the Gorechosen of Dromm so far? Think there’s anything we’ve missed? Bang a comment down below and help out some fellow Underworlds players.
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Wound the realm, if you choose to hurt everyone within 1 hex (by paying the blood tithe counter) do you get a counter for everyone you hurt? Or only on your friendly fighters?
Hey Mike. The wording on the Blood Tithe ability is ‘…After an activation step in which this fighter dealt damage or was dealt damage…’ so regardless of whether a fighter damages multiple people, gets damaged multiple times or both, that fighter would still only gain the 1 token.
I have also realised that technically Wound the Realm would occur in the Power step, which is part of the player turn but not the Activation step. So technically you don’t get any blood tithe. Still very useful to have against weaker warbands.