Gnomes for Ravening Hordes

Hello Old School Miniature fans,

We humbly present for your Old School gaming needs: a Gnomes army list compatible with Warhammer Ravening Hordes 6th ed. We designed the army list to be a mix between a fantasy army list and aspects of the medieval Swiss army list found in Warhammer Historical.

Feel free to leave feedback, comments, tactical advice, or to share a battle report. If you feel we got point values wrong, let us know how we can get them more right.

We will add organ gun rules consistent with later army supplements from 6th ed.

You can find Gnomish Magic here.

This is our fan army list, it does not connote any support, endorsement, or officiality by Gamesworkshop. Used without permission. No challenge to their status intended. All rights reserved to their respective owners.

Our "Methodology"

Drafting an army list compatible for 6th ed. and later editions of warhammer presents a number of problems. The largest is that these later editions of Warhammer do not have an explicit means of point calculation. In earlier editions of Warhammer it was made transparent how model point costs were calculated. In 6th ed, this is less apparent. There are occasional commonalities where gear prices appear consistent. However the larger calculus seems to have shifted considerably. For example an empire spearman (light armor, spear, shield) in 6th ed. costs 7 points, however in 3rd ed. he would cost 9 points. The Arithemetic seems to add as follows (man (3) + spear (2) + shield (1) + light armor (1)). While the mundane gear costs of characters seems decipherable - for Hero and Lords multiply gear costs by 2 and 3 respectively - the cost of characters becomes unclear. Given all of this ambiguity about reconstructing the points for 6th ed. we will briefly discuss each decision.

Generals and Cantonal Standards.

In the Warhammer historical "Armies of Chivarly" there is an army list for late medieval Swiss. In this list they present the Swiss army as not having any character models including a single general. As a trade off the army is allowed to have a battle standard at no cost. Our rule simply applies this precedent to the gnomish army.

Characters.

Here, we focus on the cost of the level 1 and 3 wizards. The cost of a Human level 1 wizard is 60 points. The cost of an Orc, goblin, and Skink level 1 Shaman are respectively 65, 55, 65 points and a Skaven Warplock engineer is 60 points. The only considerable edge that an Orc Shaman has over an empire wizard is 1T. whereas a goblin is at a disadvantage of -1 WS, -1 I, -1 Ld. The skink is relatively +2 M, -1 Ws, +1 I, -1 Ld. The Engineer has a relative position of +1 M, +1 I, -2 Ld.

In sum:
+1 T = +5 pts
-1 WS, -1 I, -1 Ld = -5 pts
+2 M, -1 WS, +1 I, -1 Ld = +5
+1 M, +1 I, -2 Ld = 0
On it's face it appears that M, T, and Ld are the determinate costs for raising or lowering level 1 wizard costs by increments of 5 pts. So we chose to lower the cost of the level 1 caster by 5 pts relative to their human counterpart to 55 pts because the low toughness of gnomes is a liability.

A similar logic seems to prevail for level three wizard characters
+1 S = +5 pts (Orc Shaman)
+1 S and Frenzy = +15 pts (Savage Orc Shaman)
-1 Ws, -1 I, -1 Ld = -20 pts (Goblin Shaman)
-1 Ws, -2 Ld = -30 pts (Night Goblin Shaman)
-1M, +1 WS, +1 S, +1 T, -2 I, +2 Ld = +15 pts (Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer)
In our case a Gnome level 3 wizard is +1 WS, -1 T, +1 Ld so we decided to lower their cost by 15 pts as the lower T makes them considerably more vulnerable.

Gnomish infantry

In warhammer 3rd ed. gnomes' trade off of WS and Ld, for T gave them an advantage in close combat, but a disadvantage against ranged attacks. However, since 4th ed, the newer "to hit" chart nullified the advantage in close combat. In an attempt to balance this we have deducted 1 pt from all the costs of gnomes. This means that a hypothetical gnome with shield, spear and light armor would cost 6 pts whereas their human equivalent would cost 7 pts. These two combatants would be equally matched in close combat, but the human would suffer 25% fewer wounds from ranged fire than the gnome (assuming a 3S ranged weapon).

Gnomish cavalry

This was tricky to calculate. Ultimately, what we did was we took the cheapest cavalry in 3rd edition and 6th edition -goblin wolf riders- and compared the % point shift between editions. We applied this as a coefficient to our 3rd ed. gnome army list and then added the relevant gear costs. (Spear +2 pts, shield +1 pt, scout and skirmish +2 pts.) For example this yields scout and skirmishing fox patrols armed with crossbows for 15 pts. Compare this to a 15 pts Skaven gutter runner with throwing stars or a Wood Elf scout with longbow for 14 pts. This feels appropriate. Alternativey, it yields Fox riders with spear, light armor and shield for 12 pts. Compare this to a Bretonnian mounted squire for 15 with shield, and spear or a goblin wolf rider with spear, light armor, and shield for 16 pts. Both the squire and goblin have more toughness, and movement than the gnome.

Gnomish Artillery

These numbers are admitedly more speculative. The gnomish cannons are essentially equivalent to the Bronzino's galloper guns, except they cannot move and shoot at a rate of 8". Each galloper gun cost 100 pts in 5th ed. Similarly the dwarf cannons cost 110 pts in 5th ed. However, we aren't looking at 5th ed, we are looking at 6th ed. In 6th ed. that same dwarf cannon costs 100 pts. Essentially we have an equation where:
[ gnome cannon + galloper mobility]*1.1 = Dwarf Cannon = 100 pts.
Gnome cannon = [100/1.1] - galloper mobility

This doesn't help much as it's not clear how much that added mobility is worth (I suspect that GW didn't know how much it was worth, which is why more expensive models tend to have their points value fluctuate by units of 10 pts. This may be indicative of a guess and check/what feels right approach to determining point costs.) We decided this mobility was worth roughly 20 pts, arriving us at a cost of 60 pts per gnomish cannon.

For the Gnomish organ gun, we decided to postulate that dwarf cannon/gnomish cannon = dwarven organ gun/ gnomish organ gun. We decided upon this ratio, since the dwarf organ gun rules in Ravening Hordes essentially ask players to shoot the normal dwarf cannon 5 times and the gnomish organ gun by extension is 4 dwarf cannons. This gave us a point value of 110 pts (actually 108, but we rounded up.)